Sunday, May 11, 2014

Amid the righteous indignation that has attended the tragic abduction of
more than 300 school girls in Chibok, Borno State, by Boko Haram terrorists, Nigerian
First Lady Patience Jonathan managed to regale the Nigerian public with a
much-needed comic relief during a televised rebuke of the principal of the
secondary school from which the girls were abducted.

“Do you come with two teachers? You were not informed, too? Eh? Kontinu
[Continue]. No problem. God will see us. There is God. There is God in
everything we are doing. Those bloods that are sharing in Bronu [Borno] will
answer.

“What of two teachers, Wayec [WAEC; West African Examination Council], two
teach..., ehn two, ehn…. What of two teachers that can tell us that they
conducted that exam? Do you come with any? Prispal [Principal], no too? Na only
you waka come? Okay!

“Now the First Lady is calling you. Come, I want to help you. Come to find
ya [your] be... ya [your] child, ya [your] missing child. Will you keep quiet?
Chai! Chai! There is God o! There is God o! The bloods we are sharing, there is
God o! There is God o! There is God o! There is God o! There is God o! There is
God o! [followed by a transparently contrived and exaggeratedly melodramatic wailing
and the tape fades].”

This transcript of the First Lady’s catechistic grilling of the principal is
less sensible, and certainly less theatrical and comical, than the oral
rendition, but it’s a great starting point for a socio-linguistic analysis. (See the video below. Start from 1:03).

Out of curiosity, I asked a native English speaker to watch the video and
let me know what she understood the First Lady as saying. She understood only
about 30 percent of it. When she read the transcript, she was able to make
sense of about 40 percent of it. It immediately became apparent to me that one
has to be inserted in, and have an intimate familiarity with, Nigerian cultural
idioms to be able to wholly decode the First Lady’s speech act.

It is true, of course, that Mrs. Jonathan’s spoken English falls short of
even the prevailing standards of acceptability in Nigerian English, but no
Nigerian born and raised in Nigeria would have a hard time understanding her.
So here is how I decoded Patience Jonathan’s performative utterances to a
native English speaker.

1. “Do you come with two teachers?”
By the logic of Standard English, the question suggests that the First Lady
wants to know if the principal habitually comes to some place, presumably the
Presidential Villa, with two teachers. That is obviously not the sense she
wanted to communicate. She wanted to know if the principal came with two
teachers. That sense is correctly communicated by saying, “Have you come with
two teachers?” American English speakers would say, “Did you come with two
teachers?” The First Lady’s utterance is therefore a simple case of an
incompetent grasp of elementary English syntax and tense.

2. “God will see us. There is God.
There is God in everything we are doing.” There is an extravagant overload
of Nigerian socio-cultural and linguistic codes that need to be unpacked in these incoherent utterances. First, to theists, the idea that “God will see us” in
this earthly existence is borderline blasphemous. That utterance suggests, at
least by the logic of Standard English, that God currently doesn’t “see” us
either because He is unable or unwilling to do so, but that He plans to see
us at a future date. Theists would say God already sees us and always will. But
it’s clear that the First Lady meant to say “God sees us” or, perhaps, “God
will judge us.” Tenses are obviously not Mrs. Jonathan’s strong suit.

As a standalone sentence, “there is God” is almost meaningless in Standard
English. It is both unidiomatic and unnatural to the syntactic structure of
English. Syntactically, it would make more sense to say “God exists,” or “God
is real,” but since the First Lady wasn’t having an argument with an atheist
about the existence of God, she probably meant to say something like “God lives
in us.”

However, as a native speaker of a Niger-Congo language, I can relate to the
expression “there is God.” It’s a direct, unidiomatic English translation. In
Baatonu, my native language, “Gusuno wa”
(which directly translates as “there is God”) is uttered in moments of acute
feelings of anxiety about injustice or unpunished wrongdoing. I am guessing
that the First Lady was translating an equivalent expression from her native
language into English when she said “there is God o!”. She has my sympathy here,
because I can’t think of an exact idiomatic equivalent of that expression in
English.

“There is God in everything we do” is probably best rendered as “God knows
all we do” in Standard English. So in one speech act the First Lady
simultaneously denudes God of the capacity to see us AND affirms His abiding
presence in all we do. In other words, God doesn’t currently see us, yet He
dwells in us. This contradictory reading is, of course, the consequence of mixing
English and Nigerian of socio-linguistic codes. In truth, the sense Mrs.
Jonathan sought to express was this: God is a just God who abides in all we do
and will someday sit in judgment over our deeds in this world.

3. “Those bloods that are sharing in
Bronu [Borno] will answer.” I must admit that this one threw me off a little
bit. “Blood” is almost never pluralized in English. It’s “blood” whether it’s
singular or plural. When blood is pluralized to “bloods” it can mean one of two
things. In American English it means members of a street gang in Los Angeles,
California. (The “b” in the “blood” is usually capitalized, that is, it’s
usually written as “Blood.”) In British
English slang “bloods” can mean “handsome young men.”

So, I thought: who are these
“bloods”? Maybe Boko Haram members? And what are the “bloods” sharing? Maybe the abducted
girls? And what will they answer?

Upon deeper reflection, I realized
that the First Lady actually meant that the blood that is being shed in Borno
will someday avenge. Again, here, you have to be versed in the Nigerian
cultural cosmology to understand how the dead can strike back. It basically
means the unearned agony that the dead suffered will someday ignite a karmic retribution
against the people who murdered innocents in cold blood.

4. “Na only you waka come?” This
is a Nigerian Pidgin English expression for “Did you come alone?” It is a classic
case of code-switching. The First Lady switched from her cringingly
error-ridden version of Nigerian English to Nigerian Pidgin English without
warning. But it was a socio-linguistically ill-advised switch because most
people in Nigeria’s far north don’t speak or understand Nigerian Pidgin English.
It was apparent from her flustered looks that the principal had no clue what
“na only you waka come?” means.

The “o” that regularly peppered the First Lady’s utterances is what I once
called a “terminal intensifier” in a May 20, 2010 article titled “Broken
English, Pidgin English, and Nigerian English.” “O” appears at the end of
most utterances in Niger-Congo languages –and in Nigerian Pidgin English—and
does nothing more than accentuate the meaning of the expression that precedes
it.

6. “The bloods we are sharing, there
is God o!” “Bloods” sharing again? This made my blood run cold. I thought:
is this some inadvertently confessional admission that the First Lady and her
husband (since she said “we”) are a blood-sucking conjugal dyad? It didn’t take
long, however, to realize that she was probably repeating the sense I explained
in point number 3, but used “we” to mean that the whole Nigerian society is
somehow complicit in Boko Haram’s mass murder of innocents. That doesn’t make
any sense, though, but sense-making isn’t the First Lady’s priority.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). For more than 13 years, he wrote two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust). From November 2018, his political commentaries appear on the back page of the Nigerian Tribune on Saturday.In April 2014, Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.